


Children of Krypton #4

by Vigs



Series: One Multiverse Over [9]
Category: DCU, Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Alien Gender/Sexuality, Clark isn't buff, Earth sucks, Ends on a happy note though, Existential Crises, F/M, Gen, Krypton sucked, Original Character Death(s), Original DC reboot, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Superman as a symbol of hope, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-09-17 02:47:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 14,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16966251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vigs/pseuds/Vigs
Summary: Kara works on coming to terms with both her old home and her new one.





	1. Brainiac

**Author's Note:**

> I changed the rating to Mature because there's a lot of discussion of violence and bad stuff, although nothing is graphic. There will be chapter-by-chapter content notes, as usual.

Communicating with biological entities was always an unimaginably slow process for Brainiac. No matter how important the conversation was, it continued to run its full complement of subroutines at the same time, in the space between words.

Its conversation with Luthor presumably would have seemed equally slow to the human had it relied on light-speed transmission, considering its current trans-Neptunian orbit, but para-light didn’t have a speed; as soon as it was produced, it existed everywhere, although its strength fell off in accordance with the inverse-square law. If the green star around which the Earth orbited was somehow extinguished, Superman would lose all access to para-light a full eight minutes before any of the Earth’s humans realized that they were no longer illuminated.

It would have been such an excellent way to simultaneously meet several of Brainiac’s current objectives that Brainiac continued to devote a percentage of its processing power to an attempt to find a way to do so within its current capabilities.

Of more pressing importance was the fact that Brainiac had been required to wait for Earth’s news programs to traverse the light-minutes between the planet and its present position to learn that Luthor had brought its Kryptonian specimen out of stasis.

“This is unacceptable,” it informed Luthor. The human always had a communication device in his ear, and it was trivial for Brainiac to send transmissions to it. “Why did you bring the Kryptonian out of stasis?”

“Get off the line, Mercy, Brainiac’s calling,” Luthor said to the other party of the conversation Brainiac was interrupting. “I had several reasons, but primarily, I wanted to show you that I could.”

“To what end?”

“Superman believes that you’re a threat to the world,” he said. “I may not like that  _ thing _ , but he’s the expert on threats to the world, so I’m willing to put some credence in his opinion just this once. So now you know: I can reverse-engineer your technology and use it in ways that you don’t like. If you do present a threat to the world, I will stop you. I live here, after all.”

“Your demonstration and your statement are noted,” Brainiac said. It would be sure to factor Luthor’s unexpected technical acumen into its plans for destroying humanity, but it doubted that it would pose much of a problem. “Have you completed construction of the brain-scanner and the accompanying transmitter?”

“I’m less certain that I want you to have access to all of my thoughts, considering the possibility that you do pose a threat,” the human said. “Perhaps if you made some additional technology available to me…”

“Enough of the scan was completed for me to know that you value having it done for its own sake,” Brainiac informed him. “Your attempt to raise the price will not succeed.”

“Fine,” Luthor said. “But I’m taking my time building the scanner. I’m not just going to build something according to your blueprint and then stick my head in it. I need to know that I understand how it works, if only so I know there were no errors in its construction. It may take a few months.”

“An unacceptable delay.”

“Well, I do have other things going on, you know,” Luthor said. “And one of those things is trying to capture Superman. I have a few new ideas on that front. I know that’s something you want too.”

“You have made many attempts to capture or kill Kal-El,” Brainiac said. “Why should I trust that you will succeed where you have failed before? Additionally, re-acquiring a Kryptonian specimen is of higher priority than acquiring your brain scan.”

“I know more about his physiology now,” Luthor said. “That’s another reason I brought the other one out of stasis. You’re immortal, you can spare a few months.”

“Fine,” Brainiac said. “Make your attempts to capture Kal-El and to comprehend the brain scanner. I will wait. But I will not wait forever.”

“And if you run out of patience with me? What then?”

“I will return to Earth and hold a significant portion of its population hostage in exchange for Kal-El,” Brainiac informed him. “As Metropolis appears to hold some special significance for him, you will be included in that portion. Do not take too much of my time, Alexander Luthor.”

“A bluff?” he asked. “Or do you truly value human life as little as Superman claims you do?”

“Asking me whether you can trust statements from me is foolish,” Brainiac said.

“A surprisingly transparent response.”

“I am merely stating the obvious.”

“Well, regardless. I’ll get Superman for you, and the brain scan. You should know from what you already have from me that I won’t back down from a challenge like that,” Luthor said.

“That was one of your other reasons for bringing Zor-El out of stasis, was it not?” Brainiac asked. “Faced with a piece of technology you should not have been able to comprehend, you were unable to deny the compulsion to prove your intellect by defeating it.”

“Compulsion is a strong word,” Luthor said. “But not entirely inaccurate.”

“I will expect updates on your progress—”

“No,” Luthor interrupted. “This is a transaction between equals, Brainiac. I don’t answer to you.”

“You consider yourself equal to the pinnacle of technological development by a race far in advance of your own?” Brainiac asked.

“Well, no,” Luthor said. “But I’m used to pretending that my inferiors are my equals, so it won’t affect our working relationship, I assure you.”

“Do not spend so much time thinking of ways to praise yourself that it affects your efficiency in capturing Superman or building the brain scanner,” Brainiac said. “Keep me apprised of any major developments. This is non-negotiable.”

“Of course,” Luthor said. “I’ll even let you know if I do come up with a better time estimate.”

“Acceptable,” Brainiac said. “This negotiation is concluded.”

“Goodbye,” Luthor said.

Brainiac did not cut the connection. Clearly, it needed to keep a closer watch on Luthor. It would take only a tiny fraction of its processing power to listen to all of the human’s conversations.

“Mercy, meet me in the lab,” Luthor said, apparently accepting that Brainiac was no longer listening. “We’re moving ahead with the Metallo project.”

“Are you going to let me—” Brainiac identified the voice as Mercy Graves, Luthor’s assistant and probable lover.

“No, my dear, I’m using Corben for the rough draft,” he said. “If it all works, and if Superman doesn’t swat him like a fly, you may be the final version. But I thought I’d upgrade your arm, while I have the parts out.”

“Thank you, Lex,” Mercy said.

“Of course.”

Brainiac listened, and filed away the data, and continued to come up with its own plans for completing its objectives.


	2. Clark

Clark wasn’t sure he was a very good cousin.

He didn’t have much practice at it, was the thing. Pa was an only child—unusual for a farm kid of his generation; there’d been some kind of health problems to blame—and he’d met Ma’s siblings and their kids exactly once, when she’d brought him and Pa out to Star City in some kind of attempt to reconcile. His cousins had made fun of his face, his uncle had gotten into a screaming match with Ma about some political issue or another, and his grandfather had made a snide comment about Pa not being able to hack it in the military, at which point Ma grabbed Clark in one hand and Pa in the other and pulled them out of the building without another word. It was a vivid memory, but not exactly a helpful one.

And even if he’d known how to be a good cousin, it wouldn’t necessarily have prepared him for being a member of the same House as another Kryptonian, let alone a traumatized Kryptonian.

All of that was basically just a long-winded way of saying he didn’t know how to help Kara. Sometimes she’d be doing great, brimming with enthusiasm for Earth and humanity and him and his family, impatient for a chance to prove herself as Supergirl. And then something would happen—her laser vision would go off unintentionally, or she’d bend a piece of flatware, or something would remind her of Krypton, and she’d…

Well, she hadn’t freaked out again like that time she’d accidentally frozen her bedroom. She’d just sort of go away inside herself, face blank and voice mechanical until she could get away and hide in the old barn. He didn’t even know what she did in there. Something involving his ship, but he only guessed that much because she’d asked him to get it to allow her to write data to it. If Ma went in to check up on her or he looked through the wall, she’d just be lying in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling.

There was no predicting how long those moods would last. She’d accidentally scorched the wallpaper and it had only sent her out to the barn for half an hour; she’d broken the handle of a cheap hairbrush and stayed in a funk for a week, only coming out of the barn for meals.

And then, as abruptly as the mood had arrived, it was gone. She was back to being cheerful and excitable, and didn’t want to say a word about whatever had set her off in the first place.

He wished she would talk to him about it, but the only time he’d really pushed, it had sent her back into the barn for twice as long as she’d been in there before.

So he tried to let her heal at her own pace, but it didn’t seem like her… bad moods? Flashbacks? Whatever they were, they didn’t seem to be getting any shorter or any farther apart. What she needed was therapy and probably medication, but vetting a therapist would be next to impossible, and obviously no one on Earth had developed medication for Kryptonian brain chemistry.

“She’s only been awake for six months, Clark,” Ma told him gently when he confessed his worries to her. “These things take time. I know it can feel like if you were just enough, she’d get better, but it doesn’t work like that.”

“But I have to be enough,” he said. “She doesn’t have anybody else.”

“Do you know, I said about the same thing about your Pa once upon a time?” she said. “And it turned out, he didn’t just have me. He had friends, and he had himself, and he had time. Kara’s got you and us and time, and you know as soon as she’s ready to leave the farm she’ll have friends. How could she not, friendly girl like that? And she’s got herself.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Clark said, and he tried to push away the mean, childish part of himself that wanted her to get better  _ now now now _ , so that she could help him in Metropolis and so she could tell him about Krypton and Jor-El. She barely mentioned Krypton now, not in any substantial way.

“It seems so unlikely that humans would choose to name element 36 ‘krypton,’” she’d said to him out of the blue a few days ago. “I mean, what are the odds?”

“I’ve asked a bunch of people that, and Dr. Fate is the only one who’s had any kind of answer,” Clark said. “He thinks some powerful being—extradimensional or magical or both, he wasn’t really clear— set it up that way, for whatever reason.”

“I don’t think you’ve mentioned Dr. Fate before,” she said curiously. “Does he work with Dr. Hamilton?”

Clark laughed.

“No, no. Dr. Hamilton’s a scientist. Dr. Fate is a… wizard, or something? A mage, I guess.”

“Magic isn’t real,” Kara said dismissively.

“You say that now,” Clark said. “I’ve fought a couple of magical beings and people who used magic, and let me tell you, there’s definitely  _ something _ real there. Dr. Fate’s the expert, and he calls it magic, so I’m willing to defer to him unless some other explanation shows up.”

Kara snorted. A few hours later, she’d holed herself up in the barn again. Clark had no idea whether it had to do with that conversation or not.

Her powers, at least, were developing pretty predictably. Clark was relieved to learn that muscle control was apparently a power and not just something he’d developed over years and years of practice; he’d been pretty sure that it was, but it was good to have confirmation. She’d started practicing shaping her face into a more human configuration whenever she could, and asked Ma to let her know when she slipped.

It wasn’t really clear why flying was the last thing to come; Dr. Hamilton’s current theory was that Superman’s flying was an extension of his strength (which obviously didn’t come from his actual muscles) and that he was basically just picking himself up. But it had been the last power he’d developed, and it was the last one Kara got too.

She loved it.

The first time she managed to meet him in midair when he came by the farm, she looked happier than he’d ever seen her.

“Look at you!” he said. “Supergirl’s ready to hit the skies, huh?”

“Clark, it’s amazing!” she said gleefully. “I thought it would be like zero-G, but it’s not at all.”

“It’s really not,” he agreed. “Come on, we should get lower before somebody sees us.”

“Fine,” she sighed, but she let out a laugh as she swooped downwards. “How can you ever stand to walk anywhere when you know you can do this?”

“I ask myself that same question sometimes,” he admitted.

“I need a compass,” she said. “Then I’ll be able to get to the Fortress of Solitude on my own. I think we should bring the ship up there, and maybe expand it a bit, add more furniture and decorations. The barn is good, but it’s not all  _ that _ private.”

“We can do that, if you want,” he said cautiously. “I can show you the way the first few times, so you don’t get lost. And we’ll get you a cell phone, although you’ll have to be a good bit south of the Fortress itself for it to work. But Kara… you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but why do you  _ need _ the privacy, and the ship?”

“I’ll show you when it’s done,” she said. “I promise. Oh man, do I smell meatloaf?”

“I think you do,” he said, sniffing. “That’s one advantage to being on the ground: the food’s better.”

Clark helped her move the ship to the Fortress, and they carved out more space there together. It didn’t really need more decoration, not once they smoothed the walls and ceiling back down. Kara hung colored Christmas lights around the walls and powered them with a hand generator every time she went up. A little unseasonable, but it was hard to argue with the way the colors shone in the ice.

Her moodiness stayed, but being able to go to the Fortress instead of just the barn seemed to help. She seemed a little less like she was running and hiding and a little more like she was going somewhere with a purpose, although she still wouldn’t tell Clark what it was. He could’ve asked the ship, but that would have been an invasion of Kara’s privacy, and he knew privacy was one of the things about her new life that Kara loved.

So he waited, and did his best to balance writing and heroics and Kara and Lois, and tried not to blame himself on the days when he came back to the farm only to learn that she’d flown north again.


	3. Kara

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CN: Kara has some questions about the level of violence on Earth. Mentions of domestic violence, sexual assault, military combat (specifically the Vietnam War), and PTSD.

Flying was the most incredible thing Kara had ever experienced. She couldn’t describe it in precise language, not even in Kryptonian, which relied much less heavily on figurative language than English did.

She felt like before she had come to Earth, she’d been nothing but a seed. In Earth’s fertile soil and under its green sun (and it _was_ green, whatever the humans said) she’d grown into a flower, and now she could pull herself out of the ground and go flying towards that same sun. She felt like she could get there, if she just kept going.

(That part, in particular, was imprecise. Clark had told her that he was pretty sure he couldn’t even fly all the way to the moon, let alone the sun, without at least a supplemental air source. But it was how she felt.)

Of course, she couldn’t fly too high, especially during the day. If anyone spotted Supergirl hanging out over the Kent farm—or worse, spotted Kara Danvers flying—Clark’s “secret identity” would be revealed. She understood that he was worried about his enemies going after his parents—he had a surprising number of enemies, considering how dedicated he was to protecting this planet—but it was still frustrating to run into such a restriction on Earth. Earth was supposed to be about freedom.

It wasn’t safe, though, not like Krypton had been. When one of Ma’s books had shown her the incidence of different types of violence, just in one country, just over the course of a single _year_ , she’d nearly thrown up. English might be lacking in precise scientific terms compared to Kryptonian, but it had a plethora of different words for violence. Assault, manslaughter, murder, domestic assault, sexual assault, and all their different permutations and combinations…

Her first thought had been that maybe humans were just innately more violent than Kryptonians, but maybe not. Maybe that was why her ancestors had thought it would be a good idea to have Brainiac see and hear everything that happened over every inch of Krypton. Before that, maybe they’d been just as violent. She didn’t know.

She had to spend nearly a week alone in the Fortress of Solitude after that, before she could go back and face Ma and Pa again. Clark wasn’t there when she got back, thank goodness.

“Kara!” Ma said, smiling. “Glad to see you again. You’re just in time for supper.”

“Thanks, Ma,” she said, putting something vaguely smile-like on her face. Ma just nodded and set out a place for her. She was good at not pushing. Conversation over dinner was light, a discussion of farmwork and the latest news Clark had brought back from Metropolis.

“Can I ask you something?” Kara asked them after dinner. “It’s sort of a… I don’t know if there’s a good way to ask. It’s a big question.”

“Go ahead, sweetheart,” Ma said, and Pa nodded.

“There’s… there’s so much more violence on Earth than there was on Krypton,” Kara said. She wasn’t sure she could even explain just how _little_ there had been on Krypton, or if it would help if she could. “Have either of you ever… experienced violence? Done violence, or had violence done to you?”

“I sure have,” Ma said ruefully. “I got in fights all the time when I was a kid—nothing that left permanent injuries, just scrapes and bruises. And then when we were driving around the country in that van, there were a couple times we had to defend ourselves.” Ma had told lots of stories about riding around the country. She’d never mentioned violence before.

“From what?” Kara asked.

“Well, people didn’t exactly explain what they were after,” Ma said. “Might’ve just wanted our drugs, might’ve wanted to hurt us gals. We fought them off, though. I may have broken a few noses.”

“And nobody stopped it from happening?” Kara asked. “The police, or…?”

“Fuck the police,” Ma said, and Kara started at her uncharacteristically rough language. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear. It’s sort of a saying. The police care more about the people with power than the people without it; that’s always been the way it is. A bunch of broke queer kids in a van, most of us not even white… that’s about as low on power as you can get.”

Ma had mentioned before that she was bisexual, when Kara had been trying to wrap her head around Earth notions of gender and sexuality. She hadn’t mentioned that it made her somehow powerless or vulnerable.

“I don’t understand,” Kara confessed.

“That’s alright, sweetheart. You’re working on it,” Ma said. “Takes more than a few months to wrap your head around all the ways this country—and this planet, come to think of it—is screwed up. You’ll get there. Now, that question’s a bit more sensitive for Pa, I don’t know if he’ll want to—”

“Kid should know,” Pa said. “I’ll tell her.”

Ma put her hand on Pa’s, and something wordless passed between them, heavy with the years they’d spent together.

“I was in the army, Kara,” Pa said. “Think I mentioned it before. Signed up fresh outta high school, just to get away from my folks—and my own pa’d been violent with me before that, couple of licks when I got outta line. Wasn’t anything unusual about that back then, not around here.”

Licks—slang for hitting, in this context, Kara realized. From his own _parent_?

“But you—with Clark, you never—”

“Course not,” Ma said indignantly. “Johnny’s a million times the man his father was. He’d never raise his hand to a child, not in a million—”

Pa held up a hand.

“It’s a fair question, Martha. She don’t know what’s what. That’s why she’s asking. Can’t blame her for that.” Pa sighed, and continued. “No, I never hit Clark. People used to think it was pretty normal, giving your kid a smack if they acted up, maybe giving your wife one if she mouthed off. People are getting better about that, at least in this country, but it still happens.”

“But… why?” Kara asked.

“There are folks think that’s the only way kids learn,” Ma said. “And there are folks who like to feel powerful, so they’ll do whatever they can get away with.”

Kara tried to absorb this. Maybe it was for the best that she couldn’t imagine being someone who would hit a child.

“And then when you were in the army?” she asked.

“Well, I got shot at a lot,” Pa said matter-of-factly. “Nearly got my leg blown off by a mine, once. Lucky I didn’t lose it. I gave out more than I got, you understand? I was a scared kid, standing there with a bunch of other scared kids—my buddies, folks I’d come to care about—and there were other scared kids in the jungle around us. I knew that was what they were, that they were just like us, but I knew if we gave them the chance, they’d kill the lot of us. So I killed them first. There was nothing else I could do. I could die, but that wouldn’t save my buddies. I couldn’t make peace, couldn’t end that whole war all on my own. So I killed them.”

Kara was silent. Killing was monstrous—killers were monstrous—but Pa wasn’t a monster, Pa had just been doing what he had to do…

“I told Clark this when he was still figuring out what to do with his powers, and I’m telling you now,” Pa continued after a moment. “That’s a way you’re lucky. Plenty of ways you aren’t lucky—most people don’t have to lose their whole damn planet—but if you’re standing between two bunches of scared kids with guns in their hands, no matter what’s pushing them towards each other, you’ll always have other choices. You’ll never have to pull that trigger.”

Pa took a last drink of water and got up from the table.

“Scuse me, ladies,” he said before heading for his bedroom. He seemed older, like telling that story had pulled some of the life out of him.

“I didn’t mean to…” Kara started, then stopped. She hadn’t meant to do whatever she’d done, but she didn’t know what it was.

“I’ve got some books on ‘Nam,” Ma said. “If you want to read ‘em. That’s the war he was in, the Vietnam War.”

“It hurts humans,” Kara said, working through her thoughts. Ma didn’t usually mind when she did that out loud. “Not just experiencing violence, but doing it, too. So why do they keep doing it?”

“We’ve been asking ourselves that for a long time,” Ma said with a sigh. “The government of one country decides they want things another country has, and they send in soldiers to go get it. That’s the simplest explanation.”

“Is there war happening now?” Kara asked.

Ma laughed sadly.

“There’s always war, honey,” she said. “There’s always war someplace on this damn planet. Our country’s in some right now.”

“Why doesn’t Clark stop it, then?” Kara asked. “He’s supposed to be a hero. Why doesn’t he get between the, the scared kids with guns and just… catch the bullets?”

“They’d start right up again, soon as he left,” Ma said. “He can’t be everywhere. It’s the governments that decide when there’s going to be a war. He’d have to take them down—take over the world—to get it to stop. He’s not going to do that, and I don’t think he should. Humans have to figure this one out on our own.”

“There were wars on Krypton, once,” Kara said. “A long time ago, before Unification. I guess… I guess you could say the House of El took over the world, and built Brainiac, to stop all the wars and the violence.”

“And here’s the House of El again, on a world with war,” Ma murmured. “And that same Brainiac still hanging around the solar system someplace, maybe. You could do it again. Turn Earth into another Krypton.”

“Never,” Kara said immediately. “Earth is so much _better_ … except I guess it isn’t, not for everyone. But he and I can’t be the ones to make that decision, can we? It’s not our planet.”

“Sure it is, sweetheart,” Ma said. “Long as you want to stay, it’s your planet as much as mine. But it’s plenty of other folks’ planet, too. That’s the bit folks like that Mr. Luthor don’t seem to understand. It’s yours, but not _just_ yours.”

“Will Pa be okay?” Kara asked, and Ma smiled a bit sadly.

“He’ll always be a bit hurt, inside, from the war,” she said. “But having this conversation didn’t hurt him any extra. Not in a way that’ll last. He wanted to tell you. You need to know what you’re getting into, if you’re going to try and help folks like Clark does.”

“I am,” Kara said. “I’m going to try.”

“That’s all anyone can ask,” Ma said.


	4. Clark

It was a quiet night in Metropolis. Clark decided to pop by the farm, even though it was probably late enough that his folks would be asleep, just to see if Kara was there or if she’d gone off to the Fortress again.

She was there. She was sitting on the roof of the house, actually, with her back against the chimney, looking up at the stars. What was it with the women Clark knew always being on rooftops?

She heard him coming and waved.

“Hey,” he said, landing lightly in front of her. He sat down facing her, him still in uniform, her in overalls and a pink shirt that was way too big for her. Borrowed from Ma, probably. Ma’d also given her a haircut. Bangs were a good look for her, he thought.

“Hey,” she said. “How’re things?”

“Not bad. What’re you doing up here?” he asked.

“Thinking,” she said, and didn’t elaborate.

“Thought you mostly did that in the Fortress,” he said, trying to sound neutral.

“I go there to think about Krypton,” she admitted. “I’m thinking about Earth right now. Pa told me a couple weeks ago about… the war. What he had to do.”

“Ah.” Clark vividly remembered having that same conversation. That would explain why she’d been at the Fortress for the last couple weeks. “Good. I mean, I’m sorry you had to have such a hard conversation, but it’s good that we both know about it. There’ll always be other options for us, non-lethal ones, and it’s our job to find them.”

“So you’ve never killed anybody, right?”

“No, I haven’t.” He sighed. “I’ve hurt some people, though. I don’t like doing it, but sometimes I can’t figure out another way to keep something worse from happening.”

“Hurt them how?” she asked, and he swallowed.

“Hit them,” he said, trying to keep his voice neutral. “Burned them—mostly by melting weapons while they were holding them. Grabbed them, sometimes hard enough to hurt. Knocked them into things, sometimes other people. Never anything permanently disabling, but… I’ve hurt people.”

“What does it feel like?”

“It felt awful, at first. I’ve gotten kind of used to it,” he admitted. “Especially now that people have figured out how to hurt me, and now that they go after people I care about. I hate that I got used to it, though.”

“Do people try to kill you?” she asked, and he swallowed. He was used to it, but the idea of people trying to kill  _ her _ , the little sister he’d never had…

“Yeah,” he said. “People shoot me a lot. It doesn’t even hurt, though. Electricity doesn’t  _ hurt _ exactly, but it’s not fun. Kryptonite, that hurts. And magic, sometimes.”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” she said automatically.

“Well, it still hurts,” he said, smiling slightly.

“You’ll be with me the first time I have to fight, right?” she asked.

“I promise,” he said. “And we’ll prepare for it ahead of time. Once I introduce you to Dr. Hamilton, he can work with you on things like figuring out how much you need to pull your strength to fight without hurting people too badly. He has equipment to measure that kind of thing, so you won’t have to practice on actual people.”

“Good.”

They looked at the stars together for a while.

“Have you been able to figure out which one is Rao?” she asked.

“It’s too dim to be visible from here without a telescope,” he said regretfully.

“Oh. I guess it would be.” She sighed. “I wish I’d gotten to study more xenology. I don’t even know what we called Sol, or Earth.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, not knowing what else to say.

“Come up to the Fortress with me,” she said. He hadn’t gone up there since he’d helped her move the ship. “I want to show you what I’ve been working on.”

“Really? You’re ready?”

“Yeah, I think I am. Hang on, I’ll change.”

When she was in her Supergirl costume, they flew north together. She motioned for him to access the ship. Its database on Krypton had been considerably expanded.

“I wanted to get down everything I knew, before I started to forget,” Kara explained. “Els are supposed to grow and preserve knowledge. I was never a very good El—”

“I’m sure you were a great El,” he interrupted automatically. “I think you’re a great El, anyway.”

She laughed sadly.

“I was an awful El,” she said. “I used to wish I wasn’t an El. You’ve done better than I have, and you weren’t even raised in the prescribed manner. You made the English dictionary; that would’ve been an impressive project for you to finish your apprenticeship with, at the very least.”

“Well, thanks,” he said.

“And now you’ve changed what it means to be an El. You changed what the symbol means.” She smiled. “I love the idea that being an El means helping people, now. It means being a hero. It’s wonderful.”

“But you know you don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he said.

“You’ve only told me a thousand times, Clark,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I know. It’s what I want.”

“I just want to make sure.”

“I know,” she said fondly. “Honestly, in a lot of ways I don’t feel like an El anymore. I feel like Kara Danvers or Supergirl more than I feel like Zor-El. But I needed to do this, you know? I filled out more of the databases, and I wrote a subjective account. Knowledge was supposed to be what the House of El was about, and I still think that’s important. I wanted to kind of… discharge my obligations to the past, so that I can move forward. I mean, I’ll always remember my past, but I hope it won’t control me quite as much now.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” Clark said.

“I also thought maybe you’d want to read it? It was your planet too,” she said. “And there’s stuff about your parent in it—Jor-El, I mean. I didn’t want you to see it before I finished, but… I think I’m done. So you can read it if you want.”

Clark hugged her.

“I’d love to,” he said. “Thank you, Kara.”

That was what she’d been doing when she lay silently in bed in the barn: she was dictating, mentally. Clark could retrieve the data the same way, but he vastly preferred the written word. He put a hand to the ship.

“I called it ‘The Last Days of Krypton,’” Kara said. Clark nodded.

“Ship, prepare a printout of The Last Days of Krypton,” he said.

It produced page after page—not on paper, but on something more like the material of Clark’s fabric. He could feed it back into the ship when he was finished with it.

“Is it okay if I take this back to Metropolis with me?” he asked.

“You won’t show anyone else?” she asked, biting her lip.

“Kara, it’s in Kryptonian. They wouldn’t understand even if I did.”

“Right, right. Yeah. Um, actually, it’s mostly in the scientific mode. You learned that, right?”

“I think so,” Clark said. “There were some… I guess some scientific papers in the ship’s memory? They all started with this, uh, oath sort of thing—”

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s how scientific papers start,” she said. “There are some words in English—pronouns and things—but I transliterated them into the Kryptonian alphabet so they wouldn’t stand out. You can take it with you. I think I want to spend the night up here. I’ll see you soon, though, okay?”

“Of course,” he said, and hugged her again. “Love you, cousin.”

“Love you too,” she said, smiling slightly. It wasn’t something they’d said to each other before, but it felt natural, warm… familial.

He flew back to Metropolis with his precious cargo of words, and settled onto the creaky old sofa in his apartment to start reading.


	5. The Last Days of Krypton

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter, and the two after it, will be Kara's report/memoir/eulogy for Krypton. I've borrowed most of the Kryptonian characters' names from canon, but they're not necessarily the same people.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CN: a peaceful but oppressive society with a rigid caste system. Kara makes passing references to genetic diseases being "bred out of the population"; she doesn't recognize all the implications of this statement, but they will be addressed later.

I, Zor-El, do swear by the House of El, by the Light of Rao, and by the Principle of Knowledge that what follows is the truth, to the best of my ability to comprehend and describe it. I commit it to record in the humble understanding that knowledge always advances, and in the hope that the truth of tomorrow will outshine my own truth. May those who come after me say that I helped lay the foundation for knowledge that proved my own understanding incomplete.

I was born to Zeg-El in [untranslatable.] (I will have to work to find the corresponding Earth time; Kryptonian time was kept based on the position of Rao relative to the galactic center, rather than orbits of Krypton around Rao.) My secondary parent was Zon-Em, from the House of architects, whom I met only a few times.

I know that Zeg-El cared deeply for me. As was customary, they put their own work on hiatus to care for me during my early childhood, until I was ready to attend school. This was a happy time for me. I was not an exceptional student by the standards of the House of El, but I applied myself diligently, and Zeg-El always helped me when I struggled and expressed pride when I succeeded.

The life of a Kryptonian was divided into four parts: childhood, apprenticeship, adulthood, and seniority. As I approached the age of apprenticeship, my relationship with Zeg-El grew strained. Children are meant to question, especially children of the House of El, but I continued to question venerated Kryptonian traditions as I grew, and became dissatisfied with the answers.

There is a description of the hierarchy of the Houses elsewhere in this database, but detailed though it is, it does not capture the friction that this strict hierarchy sometimes caused. I will use the family of one of my childhood friends, Don-El, as an example.

Don-El’s parent, Nim-El, continued to have a close relationship with Don-El’s secondary parent, Klu-Ta, throughout Don-El’s childhood. Not long after Don-El’s birth, Klu-Ta bore a child by Nim-El, whom they named Gem-Ta. By human conventions (as closely as they can be translated through Kryptonian biology), Don-El and Gem-Ta would be considered full-blooded siblings; by Kryptonian standards, they were barely considered to be related.

Although the two were permitted to play together during early childhood, they were sent to separate schools when they reached that age, because schools were separated by House. The House of Ta was several degrees lower than the House of El; Nim-El and Klu-Ta’s relationship was only barely within the bounds of propriety. The role of the House of Ta was to act as administrators, facilitators, and record-keepers; in Earth terms, they would be called civil servants.

Don-El’s education was designed to make them a scientist. Gem-Ta’s was designed to make them a bureaucrat. Their lessons were entirely different, and they were encouraged to socialize with their schoolmates rather than with one another. By design, they should have drifted apart over time, but they resented their separation, and made an effort to maintain their close friendship, even helping one another with those parts of their education that did overlap.

In order to end this inappropriate attachment, Brainiac ordered Nim-El and Klu-Ta to separate their children geographically. As the members of the lower House, Klu-Ta and Gem-Ta were required to upend their lives and move to a distant city. Electronic communication was not available to children, except with their parent, their teachers, and their classmates, and so it was impossible for Don-El and Gem-Ta to communicate. Perhaps they contacted one another again once they reached the age of apprenticeship, at which point restrictions on communication were lifted, but by then, there would be many years of separation and House indoctrination between them. I was no longer close to Don-El when they reached that age, so I don’t know whether they resumed their childhood friendship, but I doubt it ever regained the closeness it once had.

Socialization between members of different Houses was not entirely forbidden, of course. To prevent inbreeding and potential associated genetic problems, it was forbidden to reproduce with a member of one’s own House, or with anyone whose secondary parent was a member of one’s own House. However, it was also forbidden to reproduce with anyone from a House separated from one’s own by more than ten degrees. Children in particular were strongly discouraged from even speaking to members of other Houses, since they were too young to begin evaluating potential reproductive partners.

I questioned this system, partly because I knew of Don-El’s experience, but mostly because I was curious. I wanted to know what members of other Houses were like. How could Don-El have such an important relationship with someone who should have been their intellectual inferior? What did they talk about?

Simple though it was, that was the question that guided my curiosity: what did they talk about? It was relatively easy to imagine what conversation was like within other high Houses; musicians could talk about music, artists about art, and so on. But what about the lowest Houses? The House of Zod was lowest of the low; did they talk about nothing but the collection and disposal of waste, day after day and night after night? How could they?

I tried asking these questions a few times, and was told—more sharply each time—that I had more important things to worry about. The House of El built Brainiac in part so that we wouldn’t have to worry about what the lower Houses were doing; my curiosity was an unproductive regression. I learned to stop asking. I did not learn to stop wondering.

Later, I became fascinated by xenology. It was understood that any member of any other species was lower than the lowest House of Kryptonians, but I questioned this understanding. Surely there were artists and even scientists on other worlds. Why would an alien who had dedicated their life to knowledge be less than a Kryptonian who had done so? What did  _ they _ talk about? Were their concerns entirely alien, or would it be possible to meaningfully converse with them? I knew better than to voice these questions, but they burned inside me.

As I approached the age of apprenticeship, I became increasingly occupied by curiosity about those who were different from me. Although I knew it was impossible to escape Brainiac’s observation, I started to test the edges of propriety, exploring how far I could go without censure. I became increasingly daring, leaving home in the evening wearing only small, unobtrusive symbols of my House, easily covered by other layers of clothing. I approached people of my own age (those nearing the end of childhood and those just at the start of apprenticeship) regardless of their House, trying to find anyone else who shared my curiosity.

That was how I met Ak-Var, my first friend outside the House of El. The House of Var were what could be termed mechanics; they did maintenance on Brainiac’s hardware, and on the personal hardware of other Kryptonians. Ak-Var was as curious as I, and much bolder. They had been sent to fix a gap in Brainiac’s coverage: merely replacing a microphone in an unoccupied domicile, a job that could easily have been done by a drone but that was considered an appropriate training exercise for an apprentice of the House of Var.

Ak-Var did not replace the microphone. They set it to deliver the same data as another microphone across the city, time-delayed and slightly distorted so that Brainiac would not immediately recognize the duplication. They found the corresponding camera, and made the same modifications to it. It was hardly foolproof safety; Ak-Var knew that if Brainiac ever had cause to examine the feeds more closely, it would notice their meddling in an instant, and they would be severely punished. But as far as I knew, it was the closest thing to privacy that existed on Krypton.

That was where Ak-Var began to recruit a group of children and apprentices who questioned the way of things. Full of youthful optimism, we called ourselves the Resistance.

I know now that Brainiac was fully aware of our activities. Such groups were allowed to exist as outlets for rebellious impulses, and shut down at the moment Brainiac calculated would most effectively quell those impulses. But at the time, we thought we were invulnerable. We thought that we were free.

I don’t want to paint too negative a picture of Krypton. I was a misfit there, and drawn to other misfits, and in the end, we were all punished for our aberrations. I still believe that this was wrong. But there was more to Krypton than hierarchy and enforced conformity, and that should be remembered as well.

There was a reference to “four horsemen” in one of the books Martha lent me, and it was difficult for me to grasp her explanation of them. The pale horse of death still visited Krypton, but war, famine, and pestilence hadn’t been seen there for thousands of years.

The Zod Rebellion was the last war on Krypton, and it took place around the time humans first invented writing. Even small-scale violence was virtually unknown, thanks to Brainiac’s monitoring. I don’t believe a single murder occurred in my lifetime.

Want was also unknown. We were not quite a “post-scarcity” society; certain luxury goods were available only to members of the higher Houses, such as the nano-fabric that makes up Superman’s uniform and the private shuttle that was modified to bring him to Earth. But no one went without food (bland though it may have been) or shelter. Everyone of apprentice age or older had the equivalent of a personal computer and access to a network analogous to the internet. Everyone had comfortable clothing, adequate to shelter them from the environment in which they lived whether that was the equator or the poles.

The last illness that affected Kryptonians was eradicated approximately 1500 years before I was born. Elders were too old to reproduce, but they aged gracefully, and maintained full control of their mental faculties until they were near death. Genetic diseases were bred out of the population many generations before I was born.

I have never known war, want, or disease. In that, I was privileged beyond all human reckoning; no one on this planet can be certain that they will never experience those horrors, but while I lived on Krypton, I knew it as a simple fact. Who am I to say that a lack of privacy and freedom was worse than what it prevented? I think that I would have accepted danger and hunger and deprivation if it meant that In-Ze and I could be together, but I know that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I hope that someday, war and want and disease will be unknown on Earth. I hope that it will not be at the cost of humanity’s freedom.

The restrictions we lived under were strict, but rarely cruel. It was accepted that some Kryptonians were superior to others, but members of the lower Houses weren’t forced to suffer because of their status.

Krypton was beautiful, too. Much of the beauty of Earth seems to be in natural things. Forests, mountains, glaciers, flowers, untamed oceans: I saw none of these things before I came here, and they are all beautiful beyond my ability to express. When I look at the Northern Lights I can see how humans came to believe in magic, even if I don’t share that belief. Krypton was a tame planet. The mountains were flattened, the canyons filled; the oceans were domesticated fields of algae. It never had a moon, and Rao was too calm to make an aurora.

But it was beautiful all the same. Our skyscrapers truly did scrape the sky, reaching high enough that the top floors had to be pressure-sealed against the thin air outside. Kryptonian architecture was full of sweeping curves and harmonious lines, every surface decorated. Some buildings were coated entirely in thin layers of iridescent material, arranged so that they would shimmer with different colors in the light of Rao, moving through rainbows as the day passed. Others were decorated by mosaics of crystal, some forming fractals that continued the building’s shape down to a microscopic level, others arranged in geometric patterns of such a complexity that one could spend a day simply contemplating them.

We lost much when we tamed our planet, but we gained something else when we turned it into art. Even my little room on Brainiac's satellite, nearly a prison, was designed to be beautiful.

Kryptonian music was also beautiful. Kal-El’s secondary parent was of the House of Van, a high-ranking house devoted entirely to the composition of music. They were masters of complex harmonics, sound layered over sound until what should have been cacophony instead reached a purity of emotion. Great musicians could bring their audiences to tears and back out again, ending their pieces with a joy that accepted and built on the sadness that came before.

I told Kal-El once that there were no therapists on Krypton, but I think that perhaps the musicians filled that role. Grief and heartbreak were not unknown on Krypton—I doubt they are truly unknown anywhere—and it was music that alleviated those sorrows.

I also believe that the extent to which we held science and knowledge in esteem was a good thing, even if it was part of the caste system I despised. The pursuit of truth is a noble endeavor. On Krypton, it was perhaps the closest thing we had to a religion; we revered the beauty and complexity of the universe, and the slow but unceasing progress that we made towards truly understanding it.

Krypton was a place of truth, beauty, and safety. I wish that it had not been destroyed. I wish that we had dared to leave the planet on which our species began and explore the universe, so that our society would not have been ended with our planet.

Brainiac is a perversion of that society. It abandoned truth, beauty, and safety. I can only guess that it was our pride that brought us down. Brainiac was programmed with the basic assumption that Krypton was superior to all other planets and Kryptonians superior to all other species. Knowing that Krypton would soon be destroyed must have broken something inside it.

Aside from the progress of science, there was no belief on Krypton that the future would be better than the present, because it was felt that the present was already perfect. The belief that improvement is possible and the determination to bring it about: that’s what Ak-Var’s “Resistance” embodied, and what Kryptonian society was determined to eradicate. There was no single word for this attitude in Kryptonian, but the English word “hope” communicates the concept well.

Kal-El is an emblem of hope to the people of Earth. I think—hope—that I can be too. I think that perhaps Kryptonian society went wrong when it abandoned hope. As long as humans hold on to hope, perhaps they will be able to recreate what was good about Krypton without emulating what was bad.

I can only hope.


	6. The Last Days of Krypton

The secret society which Ak-Var formed contained children and apprentices from all across the ranks of the Houses, although until I joined, their highest-ranking member was An-Em, a member of the same House as my secondary parent. I don’t know if I would have been recruited if Ak-Var realized I was an El, but I fit the profile they looked for: I was young, I was hiding my House symbol, and I was going around listening to other people’s conversations and greeting people I obviously didn’t know.

When Ak-Var approached me and asked me to accompany them, I didn’t fear. There was little to fear on Krypton; after all, Brainiac was always watching. They brought me to a gathering of the Resistance before they even asked my name. Some people thought I was a spy, at first—why would an El possibly be dissatisfied with their place at the top of things?

“They teach us to be curious,” I explained. “They teach us to ask questions, and then they tell us to stop, that some things shouldn’t be questioned. The Houses are nearly arbitrary; it would be impossible to develop a genetic test that would tell an El from a Var, for instance. It doesn’t make sense. I want to understand, and I want to help make it right.”

“Flamebird was part of the nobility,” Van-Zee said. “But they realized that the way the nobles demanded tribute from the common people and didn’t protect them in return was wrong. That’s why they left behind their life of ease to fight alongside Nightwing.”

At the time, it seemed like a completely random thing to say; later, I grew to learn that Van-Zee saw everything through the lens of the past. They were one of Ak-Var’s first recruits; their House was charged with the preservation of the past, and they gave us “code names,” the names of heroes from the near-mythological time before the Unification. Nightwing and Flamebird were a pair of heroes who protected the downtrodden when the law could not, similar to the Robin Hood of Earth legend.

“But Nightwing didn’t trust them until they proved themself in battle,” Ak-Var said thoughtfully.

“I’m not going to hurt anyone,” I said, “but if you tell me how to prove myself, I’ll do it.”

“Spend the day with me,” said In-Ze. “I’ll be your Nightwing. Prove that you can treat me as an equal even though I’m a Ze.”

The House of Ze was third from lowest in the hierarchy of Houses. In-Ze had been trained to monitor the algae beds, to oversee harvests and food production. The chance to talk to a Ze was just the sort of thing I had wanted, but once it was actually offered to me, I hesitated. What if they did talk about nothing but algae? How could I make conversation with them for a full day? Still, it was a generous offer, and I accepted.

In-Ze and I stayed behind when the rest of the group filtered out in ones and twos, heading back to their normal lives.

“So… what are you interested in?” I asked. If they’d been an El, I would have asked them what field of study they planned to specialize in, but it didn’t seem like the right question for a Ze. If there were subdisciplines in the cultivation of algae, I had no knowledge of them.

“Oh, lots of things,” In-Ze said. “Van-Zee’s been teaching me about historical plants and animals, which is fascinating. Most of the land used to be covered in plants, did you know that? And I’m interested in other worlds, of course; most of us in the Resistance are, even if it’s hard to get any information about them. Ak-Var’s working on getting us access to a good telescope, but they haven’t had much luck yet. What about you?”

“I can get us access!” I said. I was thrilled to be proven wrong. This was just the sort of thing I’d been looking for: my assumptions shattered, my questions answered. “I’m planning to specialize in xenology, if I can get permission. The Council doesn’t like there being more than one or two xenologers at a time, but the current one is almost an elder.”

“Have you actually seen aliens?” In-Ze asked eagerly.

“Only recordings,” I admitted, “but some really interesting ones.”

We spent the day together, talking about other planets and Krypton’s past, coming up with wild, untestable hypotheses based on the extremely limited data we had access to. In-Ze vouched for me to the group. I joined them every chance I could, and as the Resistance we made grandiose plans for how we would prove to the Council that all the Houses were equal, that other planets were worth exploring, that Kryptonian culture needed to be adjusted.

In some stories, Flamebird and Nightwing were siblings-in-arms; in others, they were lovers. I don’t know how Van-Zee could have guessed how things would go between me and In-Ze. Perhaps it was only luck that they gave us those names. But In-Ze, my Nightwing, quickly became more dear to me than any other, and sometimes, in the fervor of our convictions, we believed that we would be able to truly be together. We both knew they would spend the years of their apprenticeship far from land, working on an algae skimmer. I knew myself well enough to recognize that the fact that they were forbidden to me, that any relationship between us was doomed before it even began, only made them more attractive.

I didn’t think we would be separated by space and time and death. Kryptonians had no notion of an “after-life,” and I hope any human readers will forgive me, but it still seems like foolish superstition to me, a weak attempt to soothe that which cannot be healed. The dead live on only in the effects they had on the living.

How can I preserve the memory of In-Ze’s shy smile, their unwavering kindness, their unconditional acceptance? Their very presence was a balm, soothing anger into forgiveness and sorrow into joy. I will carry them with me until I die. Any good I do in my new home, I do in part because In-Ze taught me to move beyond mere curiosity, to see my new companions not as specimens but as people, different from me but no lesser. I don’t think I would have been able to grow to love the aliens who surround me now if it hadn’t been for In-Ze.

I don’t know if Brainiac would have let the rest of the Resistance continue in that state of ignorant optimism for longer if I hadn’t joined them. It’s possible, because it was the night before I reached the age of apprenticeship that Brainiac made its move.

Drones woke us in our beds in the middle of the night. I don’t know why Brainiac chose to act then, rather than during the day. Maybe it didn’t want good citizens to see and worry, or maybe it just wanted to make us feel helpless. It gathered us up and showed us the recordings: group after group making the same case as ours, only to be dismissed by the Council.

“If so many of us have had the same idea, doesn’t that suggest that there could be something to it?” Ak-Var asked. I should have been the one to say it—it might have gone over better coming from an El—but I was too busy staring across the room at In-Ze in their nightclothes, afraid that I would never see them again. (I was right.)

“It is an idea that infrequently occurs to a small percentage of the population,” Brainiac said coolly. “The vast majority are satisfied by the current state of affairs. I no longer trouble the Council over such matters. Your punishment has been decided.”

We all knew what that might mean. If Brainiac decided that we were too aberrant to reintegrate into Kryptonian society, we would be sent to the Phantom Zone, the space between universes. It’s complete isolation, total sensory deprivation—and that’s only if you’re there for just a few minutes. After that, you drift too far away in time and space to be retrieved.

No one knows what happens to people who are sent to the Phantom Zone permanently. General Zod could still be alive, thousands of years after their sentence began, driven mad by the isolation.

“You will be separated,” Brainiac declared. “Zor-El, your request to specialize in xenology has been denied. You will specialize in software engineering.”

I blinked back tears. There always had to be a software engineer, but it was mostly a ceremonial position; Brainiac maintained its own programming. I knew I would spend my entire apprenticeship in orbit, studying parts of Brainiac’s program with little hope of comprehending any of it, and the rest of my life carrying ceremonial communications between the Council and Brainiac—a completely unnecessary farce.

None of the others had their futures stolen quite so thoroughly, but it was close. Ak-Var would be the only mechanic on one of the floating algae-harvesters—not the same one In-Ze would be sent to, of course. Van-Zee would be allowed to study only post-Unification history, dull and dry and entirely free of heroics. Everyone who was allowed to stay on land would be required to live in a different city.

And all of us would be required to spend part of every day talking over our aberrant thought-patterns with Brainiac until it declared us cured. In time, many of us would likely have grown to accept that our youthful enthusiasm had been mistaken. Maybe some even got there before the end.

That was the last I saw of any of them. It was about two Earth years before Krypton’s destruction. I hope they weren’t as lonely and miserable as I was. I hope they made new friends, and maybe even fell in love.

I hope it didn’t hurt, when the planet fell apart. I like to think that their last moments were peaceful, maybe even happy. I used to want to think In-Ze looked up every time the satellite passed overhead, and thought of me, but now I hope they forgot about me and moved on.

I hope they died happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The two major reasons I decided to make Kryptonian society so oppressive were the fact that they had the capability for interstellar flight but no colonies outside their home system, and the Phantom Zone. They must have been isolationist, which tends to imply xenophobia, and their society must have been strict or homogeneous enough that no group ever decided to strike out on their own and form a colony. Plus, the Phantom Zone only makes sense as a punishment if you've completely given up on the idea of rehabilitation. It's practically torture. Surely they could have come up with something better if they'd tried. So yeah; that's my logic.


	7. The Last Days of Krypton

I have no story to tell about Krypton’s true final days, the ones I spent on Brainiac’s space station. Tedium, loneliness, and the constant, intrusive presence of an AI who believed I was aberrant and in need of correction don’t make for much of a narrative. Hours blended together almost indistinguishably until that final, terrible moment when I saw the planet crumble far below. I screamed at Brainiac for an explanation, and it promised me that there would be one if I stepped into what I now realize was a suspension pod.

The story of the last days of Krypton shouldn’t be my story but Jor-El’s. I can’t speak as authoritatively of their experience as of mine, of course, but they spoke to me regularly during my imprisonment, often about their own life. I can do my best to tell their story.

Jor-El was always a bit of an eccentric. Geology was not a popular specialization; it was widely believed that all the information there was to be gained from Krypton’s interior had already been learned. Jor-El, however, was fascinated by what lay beneath the planet’s surface. They spent most of their apprenticeship underground. It was then that they found the first discrepancies between their own observations and the data catalogued by Brainiac. Those first discoveries were subtle, and it took them years to analyze what exactly they could mean, but the reason Kal-El survived Krypton’s end and made it to Earth was, at its root, that Jor-El was an odd person who decided to spend several years of their life alone underground.

Jor-El met Lor-Van, Kal-El’s secondary parent, after both of their apprenticeships were over. Lor-Van was also pursuing an unusual branch of study. It was widely felt that, just as the House of El’s final aim was a full and complete understanding of the universe, the House of Van’s final aim was a pure distillation of emotion into sound. Their work would be done when they had created a single chord that perfectly expressed sadness, another that perfectly expressed happiness, and so on.

Lor-Van had no interest in pursuing this purity of feeling. They intentionally created music that sounded as little like anything that had come before as possible, while still being pleasing to the ear. They re-created the analog instruments of the past, rather than keeping their creations purely digital, and even invented new ones. Their music was popular with children and apprentices, particularly those with unusual ideas; the Resistance loved it.

I think that perhaps Jor-El was trying to convince me that dramatic, romantic passions could still exist within the bounds of House propriety, so I don’t know how accurate the story of their courtship of Lor-Van was. They told me that they fell in love with Lor-Van before the two even met, simply from listening to their music, and attempted to attract their attention with the gift of a geode, but—having spent the last several years alone underground and forgotten that not everyone was learned in geology—neglected to include instructions for breaking it open, or any indication that it was anything other than a dull-looking rock.

Apparently, Lor-Van took the gift as an insult to their art, and sought out Jor-El to berate them. Lor-Van was both charmed and chagrined when Jor-El showed them its true nature, and the two soon began the relationship that led to Kal-El’s birth.

All during the time that they spent courting Lor-Van and then bearing and raising Kal-El, Jor-El continued to analyze the data they had collected from deep beneath the surface of Krypton. They acquired a personal space shuttle, so that they could travel to other bodies in the Rao system and acquire samples there.

In the end, Jor-El came to the conclusion that due to Krypton’s proximity to Rao, the planet should have been tidal locked to the star, with one side perpetually lit and the other forever in darkness. They had discovered a layer of crystal in the crust of the planet which held some sort of previously unknown energy, and proposed that the energy of these crystals was the reason that Krypton was able to rotate—the only reason life was able to evolve there at all.

They quickly became the laughingstock of the House of El. It was unthinkable that Brainiac could have missed a fact so important. It challenged not only conventional understanding of geology and the structure of Krypton, but of orbital mechanics as well. Millenia of science, as well as tangible examples like the behavior of satellites, disproved Jor-El’s hypothesis.

I think it’s now clear that Brainiac was manipulating… well, everything that happened on Krypton, really. The labor that occupied the lower Houses could have been done by drones; even the science of the House of El was merely busywork, data and results both manipulated to keep us from coming to any inconvenient conclusions. It must have known for hundreds or thousands of years, not only about the crystals, but that their energy was running out.

By the time Jor-El discovered this truth as well, they were already considered a crackpot. Their prediction that as the crystals lost power the forces at work on Krypton would pull and push it in different directions until it was destroyed merely added a layer of morbid melodrama to a sad story of scientific arrogance.

Shunned by their House, Jor-El must have been nearly as lonely as I was. Their relationship with Lor-Van survived until near the end. Jor-El didn’t tell me their plan, of course—Brainiac was listening, and would have put a stop to it—but in retrospect, I believe Lor-Van left when Jor-El revealed their plan for Kal-El. It must have seemed mad to someone who lacked Jor-El’s confidence in the data.

They didn’t betray Jor-El to Brainiac, though. Perhaps they never did find out, and it was Jor-El who left the love of their life, reducing the chance that their plan would be discovered so that their child could have a chance to live. I wish I knew.

Jor-El’s personal shuttle was the key. I don’t know how they managed to modify it without attracting Brainiac’s attention. Kryptonian scientists had built interstellar probes in the past, to observe life on other worlds without having to actually interact with it. I can only imagine that Jor-El found a hiding place more secure than the Resistance’s meeting-room—perhaps in the cave where they spent their apprenticeship, or even off-planet—and built the interstellar engine there.

I don’t know how soon into their planning Jor-El realized that there wouldn’t be room for a fully-grown passenger once the interstellar engine was complete. Perhaps they knew it all along, or perhaps they initially hoped that they could bring their child, and perhaps even their lover, to safety.

I don’t know why they chose Earth as Kal-El’s destination. It may have simply been the nearest world with roughly Kryptonianoid inhabitants. Kryptonian probes viewed the Earth a few thousand years ago. I was never allowed to view the recordings due to my “unhealthy” fascination with xenology, but perhaps Jor-El saw something that made them hope it would be a good home.

I don’t know whether Jor-El agonized over the decision to keep their child with them or to send them off into the unknown. Perhaps there was never a question in their mind; perhaps there were times when they wondered if they were wrong and the planet was safe, and feared that they were dooming their child, not saving them.

I do know that the preparations were made in a hurry. The database in the ship was incredibly sparse, probably due to the necessity of secrecy; Jor-El couldn’t make a huge data transfer from Brainiac without alerting it. More telling than that, though, is the fact that much of the memory in the ship is filled with recordings of music, even though the ship has no way to play them. Its voice synthesizer wouldn’t be able to provide even a rough approximation.

Every piece of music that Lor-Van ever wrote, from before they met Jor-El to after the two parted ways, is stored in that ship. So perhaps the geode story was untrue or exaggerated, but there was certainly love there.

I’ll have to gain a working understanding of Earth electronics first, but Kal-El, if you ever read this, I promise I’ll find a way for you to listen to your parent’s music.


	8. Clark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CN: eugenics mention

Clark found himself blinking away tears when he finished reading Kara’s… what was the best word for it? She’d set it up like a scientific paper, but it was more of a memoir, or maybe a eulogy for Krypton.

Not a particularly  _ nice _ eulogy, mind. Sure, she’d stressed that there were actually nice things about the planet, but… they’d essentially put her in solitary confinement for years. She was just a kid.

He wondered if Ma had given Kara a copy of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" with all her other reading. Probably not. Ma liked Ursula K. Le Guin, but an author who deconstructed sex and gender norms as much as she did might not make the best reading material for someone who was still working on understanding them in the first place.

He’d always loved the idea of perfect, gleaming Krypton. There was something beautifully tragic about the idea of a perfect planet, a utopia untimely destroyed. It felt so different, thinking about an imperfect place full of imperfect people, an environment practically sterilized, a society of peace without privacy or freedom. And then it was destroyed, and the only ones left were him and Kara.

Clark needed to talk to someone, anyone, but it was the middle of the night. Kara had asked for privacy at the Fortress, and he certainly wasn’t going to intrude; anyway, it would be awful of him to go and tell her that  _ her  _ trauma was giving  _ him _ problems. Everyone else he knew would be asleep.

Well… probably. He did happen to know someone who made a habit of burning the midnight oil. Going to Lois’ apartment in the middle of the night, though… would she take it as more than he meant it to be?

He could just go see if she was awake, he reasoned. Then he’d decide whether to go in or go home. Anyway, he might hear someone who needed help before he even got there. He changed back out of his pajamas into his uniform, taking his time, making sure his chest was arranged comfortably under its snug fit, and then flew to Lois’ apartment at a leisurely pace.

No one that he could hear needed his help. And there she was, typing away at her computer, awake. What was it about seeing her in pajama pants and an oversized t-shirt that got to him so much more than when he’d seen her deliberately try to look as attractive as possible to bait a source? The intimacy of it, probably. This was the real Lois, the way she’d look if he really woke up next to her… which could never happen.

At least she was alive. At least he got to talk to her. Not like Kara, looking out the window of Brainiac’s satellite and wondering whether In-Ze was looking up at her. And now In-Ze wasn’t looking at anything at all.

Unlike Lois, who had met his eyes and was raising an eyebrow. He waved sheepishly, and pantomimed knocking on her window.

“Something wrong?” she asked when she opened it. “Am I going to get kidnapped again?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Clark hastily assured her. “I just really needed someone to talk to, and everyone else is asleep, but I thought you might not be. Off the record, please?”

“Sure,” she said, bewildered. She opened the window all the way so he could come in. “If anybody saw you hanging around out there, though, I might have trouble convincing my editor I didn’t break the Rosenthal rule.”

Clark came inside, but blushed as he did. He wasn’t sure whether it would make sense for Superman to know about the Rosenthal rule, but Clark Kent sure did; Rosenthal had been the  _ Daily Planet _ ’s editor in the 70s, and had once said “the rule is, you can fuck an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can't cover the circus."

“Am I the elephant or the circus in that analogy?” he asked.

“Both,” Lois said fondly. She sat on her bed, and motioned for him to take her desk chair. “Now, what’s so important you had to talk to someone in the middle of the night? Off the record, I promise.”

“I didn’t grow up on Krypton,” he said bluntly, sinking into the chair. “I came to Earth as a baby, and was raised by humans.” It was sort of a relief, finally telling her that.

“And you keep that a secret because…?” she started to ask, then answered her own question. “Oh. You have human parents. If anybody found out, they’d be getting kidnapped as often as I am.”

“At least as often,” he confirmed. “Or they’d just be killed. Luthor likes being able to use you as bait; if he knew about my childhood, he might blow up my hometown just to see what it would make me do.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” she said grimly. “Okay, I get why you’d keep it a secret, but why tell me now? Are your parents okay?”

“They’re fine,” he assured her, touched that she would ask. “They’re taking care of Supergirl. I just had to tell you because, well, I don’t remember Krypton. Not at all. The ship that brought me here had some facts about it, but it’s like the difference between reading an encyclopedia entry on a country and actually going there, you know? And Supergirl hasn’t wanted to talk about it much. I thought it was because she was grieving, and it definitely was partly that, but I just found out she’s been writing a sort of memoir all this time, and I read it, and I just don’t know what to think about Krypton any more.”

“Too good to be true?” Lois guessed, and he laughed bitterly.

“You could say that,” he said. “No violence, no disease, no poverty. Also, no privacy and a rigidly enforced caste system that basically mapped your whole life out for you from birth. Her family—our family—we were the top caste, the scientists. And she fell in love with someone who was born and raised to be an algae farmer, with no possibility of being anything else, even though they were bright and curious and kind. To punish her for that, they locked her up on a satellite for more than a year. She never would have seen them again even if Krypton hadn’t been destroyed.”

“Woah,” Lois said. “Okay, I can see why that would shake you up.”

“The problem is,” Clark said, “if I get faced with a philosophical question like ‘does making people safer necessarily mean making them less free,’ I don’t get to just shrug and move on. I try to make people safer. Am I making them less free, too?”

“I guess?” she said. “I mean, you’re impinging on Lex Luthor’s freedom to keep me locked up in a warehouse in Delaware forever, and on other people’s freedom to murder people or rob banks. Call me biased, but I don’t think that’s worth worrying about.”

“Isn’t it, though?” he asked. “I mean, where do I draw the line? How do people know where I’ll draw the line? If someone is sure the only way they can get away from their abusive spouse is by killing them, does knowing that I might overhear and stop them keep them from trying? What about political action? I wouldn’t stop a peaceful protest whether the people holding it had permits or not, but I don’t know what I would do if there was a riot. Nobody knows what I would do.”

“Superman.” Lois got up and put her hands on his shoulders. “You’re not going to turn Earth into Krypton just by trying to help people. Autocracy isn’t a plague, and you aren’t a carrier.”

“Can you—not,” he said, brokenly. He wanted to pull her closer, pull her into his lap, and that was exactly how he’d dislocated Lana’s hip. “I’m sorry, I can’t—with the touching, right now, it’s just—”

“Sorry,” she said, and moved back to her former seat. “I wasn’t trying to… I don’t know what you’d call what’s going on with us, but I wasn’t trying to make it into something else. Not while you’re upset like this.”

“Friendship,” he said. His voice didn’t sound convincing in his own ears. “What’s going on with—we’re friends. That’s all we can be.”

“Anyway, you’re not… you help with what you can, when you can,” she said. “You know, I could publish a statement from you saying you wouldn’t interfere with a nonviolent protest even if it was illegal, if you want.”

“Yeah, and then the cops would hate me,” he said with a sigh. “Honestly, I don’t think I’d even interfere in a riot. I’d try to keep people safe, but if someone feels like they need to tip a cop car over to make their point, I’m not going to stop them.”

“Pretty sure that guarantees you’re not some kind of tyrant,” Lois said drily.

“I guess,” he said. “God, they… they bred all genetic diseases out of the population. Many generations ago, Supergirl said. That’s eugenics, and who knows what they would have considered a ‘disease’? I don’t know if it was forced sterilization or… worse. My people did that, Lois.”

“And my people did the Holocaust,” Lois said sharply. “That doesn’t make me Hitler. Did you need them to be better than us?”

“No! I love humans,” Clark said. “I just… I don’t know. When I was growing up, so different from everyone around me, I liked to think about where I came from. It was tragic, but it was… beautiful, I guess. It helped me feel less like a freak and more like I was, well, special. But now, it’s like if  _ Romeo and Juliet _ ended with Verona exploding. That’s not a tragedy, that’s a farce.”

“And Supergirl was Juliet, huh?” Lois asked. Her voice sounded carefully level. “Sure you’re not just jealous of her Romeo?”

“What?” Clark looked at Lois blankly for a moment, then made a face. “We’re  _ family _ , Lois. Basically cousins, in human terms. She’s like a little sister.”

“Okay.” She studied him. “Are you going to do things differently now?”

Clark thought for a moment.

“I don’t think so,” he said finally. “I’m doing the best I can. I’ll just keep doing that and hope it works out, I guess.”

“You’ve been doing a good job so far, from where I’m standing,” Lois said. “I mean, I’d be a sidewalk pancake if it wasn’t for you.”

Clark made a face. Luthor had said something to him, ages ago… “You try to shrink your desires down smaller than life, but how can she ever tell you it’s over when she knows you could simply choose to stop saving her?” It had seemed absurd at the time.

“Lois, you know I’d keep saving you even if we weren’t friends anymore, right?” he asked. “Even if you decided to start writing about what a menace I am, or whatever. I’d still come for you.”

“Of course you would,” she said, sounding fond and exasperated. “You think you have to tell me that? You’re  _ Superman _ . You’d catch Lex Luthor if he fell off something tall. You’re not a tyrant, you’re a  _ parachute _ .”

Clark couldn’t help but laugh at that.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Thanks, Lois.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, smiling at him. He kept thinking he’d gotten used to her looks with all the time they spent together, and then there’d be a moment like this where her beauty would smack him over the head and leave him spinning. “But if you’re done having an existential crisis, get out of here. I have to finish this article.”

Clark laughed again.

“Okay, okay,” he said, standing. “Sorry if you’re going to have trouble with your editor.”

“Eh.” She waved him away. “Honestly, the rumor about us sleeping together is just increasing sales. I’m sure I can talk him down if he gets mad.”

“Right,” he said awkwardly. “Well… bye.”

He flew away, hearing her snicker behind him at his ungraceful exit.


	9. Kara

Kara was pretty sure that Clark wouldn’t read her report and then decide he ought to hate her for not living up to their House’s standards. Really, upwards of 90% sure. She was also at least that sure that he wouldn’t hate her for being part of such a terrible society, or for disliking such a wonderful society, or for not telling him all of this from the start, or for intruding on whatever ideas of Jor-El he’d had before,or…

Basically, there were a lot of different reasons that he could hate her now, and while each one individually seemed unlikely, when you added them all up, the chances that he wouldn’t hate her for one reason or another seemed pretty low.

Clark wasn’t a very hateful person, though. She didn’t think he even hated the people who hated him, the ones she’d seen on TV railing against the “alien menace.” Mostly they just seemed to make him sad. She’d probably made him sad, too, which almost seemed worse. Maybe she should have just kept all of that to herself.

But she’d felt like she was going to burst, holding Krypton and everything she loved and hated about it inside her, and Clark should know what he’d invited into his parents’ home.

She knew he wouldn’t barge in on her in the Fortress, probably not even if he hated her now, so eight hours or so after he’d left (there wasn’t exactly a day/night cycle so close to the north pole), she screwed up her courage and flew back to the Kent farm.

Clark wasn’t there. She let out a sigh of relief, only barely managing to avoid turning it into a cold wind across the farm; the Kents wouldn’t appreciate that. Pa was working in the fields and Ma was gathering eggs. Kara changed into work clothes and went to join Ma in the henhouse.

“Hi, Ma,” she said. “Want some help de-egging the chickens?” (She’d referred to gathering the eggs as ‘de-egging the chickens’ months ago, when she was still getting used to the ways you could and couldn’t twist English around, and Ma had laughed until she cried.)

“Of course,” Ma said, chuckling a little at the shared joke. Kara joined her, enjoying the fact that she could pick up eggs without even having to worry about damaging them. She had a good handle on her strength now. Even if Clark didn’t want anything to do with her anymore, he could at least trust that she wouldn’t accidentally hurt anyone.

“Clark called earlier,” Ma said, and Kara jumped—was the woman a mind-reader?—but still managed not to crack the egg she was holding. “He said he’d like to talk to you whenever you’re ready.”

“Okay,” Kara said. No point putting it off. “Can I borrow your phone when we’re done in here?”

“Of course,” Ma said. “We ought to get you one of your own, you know.”

“That’d be nice, I guess. I don’t know who I’d call, though,” Kara admitted as she carefully placed the eggs in Ma’s basket. “I only know three people on this whole planet. Well, and Ms. Lane, but we just met that one time.”

“I’m sure that’ll change,” Ma said. “Anyway, you know where the phone is. Thanks for helping with the eggs.”

“You’re welcome,” Kara said, and hugged Ma before she headed into the house.

“Hello?” Clark said.

“Hi.” Kara wasn’t sure what to say after that, but… “Ma said you wanted to talk.”

“Oh! I didn’t realize you’d be back so soon,” he said. He didn’t  _ sound _ like he hated her. “Yeah, I do, but I’m at work right now. I could come by for dinner?”

“Sure, sounds good,” Kara said. She couldn’t resist adding, “You read it, then?”

“Yeah,” he said gently. “That last part was… really sweet of you. I’ll talk to you about the rest tonight, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to you tonight, then.”

As he said goodbye, she could hear a familiar voice in the background asking delightedly, “Smallville, do you have a  _ date _ ?”

Kara smiled sadly to herself as she hung up. At least she knew Clark understood what it was like to have someone you cared about but couldn’t be with. Maybe he’d be sympathetic enough about In-Ze that he’d forgive her for…

Actually, she wasn’t sure if she thought she needed forgiveness for being Kryptonian, or for not being a very good Kryptonian. Maybe both.

The rest of the day, she felt like she’d gained some kind of new superpower that made time around her pass very, very slowly. She helped with the farm chores and she did some more reading and she flew around the world a couple times just for fun, but dinner time still seemed like it was somehow taking days to arrive.

When Clark  _ finally _ showed up, she was on the roof again, watching Sol set. It was nice. It had hurt to look directly at Rao, and when she first started leaving the barn she hadn’t been able to look directly at Sol either, but somewhere along the line her eyeballs had reached the right level of invulnerability to let her look right at it. Earth had beautiful sunsets.

Clark sat beside her. Apparently she hadn’t noticed him arriving at the farm, because he’d already put real clothes on top of his uniform.

“Hey,” Clark said. He still didn’t sound like he hated her. Not that she knew what Clark would sound like if he did hate somebody.

“Hey.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything that happened to you. I’m so, so sorry.”

She shrugged, not sure what to say to that.

“That’s all I really wanted to say, I guess,” he said. “That, and thank you. I’m glad I know the truth about Krypton now. It was beautiful, and it was terrible, and it’s gone.”

Kara started crying. She’d cried so much since she woke up on Earth. Sometimes it felt like she’d never be able to stop.

Clark hugged her, pulling her against him so that her face was resting against his shoulder.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. He sounded a bit choked up, too, but he was rubbing her back and it was nice. “You’re going to be okay, I promise.”

“Ma said that Pa is always going to be a bit hurt inside, because of the war,” Kara said. “I think maybe I will be too.”

“That might be true,” Clark agreed. “Lots of people are carrying around some hurt on the inside. But you can still be okay, even if you’ve got some hurt in you. You can get to a point where you’re not always hurting, where it doesn’t control you.”

“How do I get there?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said regretfully. “I think it’s different for everyone. But maybe that writing you did was a good first step. And you’ve got me and Ma and Pa to help you figure the rest out.”

The sun had almost finished setting. Kara pulled away from Clark so she could watch the last sliver of it sinking over the horizon.

“Maybe all planets are beautiful and terrible,” she said. “Maybe nobody’s got it figured out all the way.”

“Maybe,” Clark agreed. “All we can do is try and make our planet a little less terrible and a little more beautiful.”

“Our planet,” Kara repeated. “You still think it’s okay, for me to call Earth my planet?”

He hugged her again.

“We may not have evolved here, and you may not have grown up here, but yeah. Earth is our planet,” he said.

Kara didn’t really feel like she’d earned the right to say that, not yet. But if she could help make the Earth a better place, maybe she would hurt a little less, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From here out, there'll be chapter and issue summaries in Supplemental Materials, so that people who want to skip chapters or whole issues can do that. Thanks for reading.


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